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Performance Study of Routing Protocols in ZigBee Wireless Mesh Networks

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Abstract

ZigBee is one of the key standards that enable low-cost and low-power wireless mesh networks. Working on top of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC/PHY standard, ZigBee defines higher layers that support reliable multi-hop wireless communications. In particular, ZigBee provides multiple routing protocols to support diverse application traffic types such as multipoint-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and point-to-point. However, there are no studies that thoroughly incorporate multiple ZigBee routing protocols. In this paper, we explore multiple unicast routing and many-to-one protocols incorporated into the ZigBee standard and compare them through extensive simulations using NS2. We discuss real-world implementation issues and introduce our implementation decisions. We also examine their suitability for different scenarios and discuss some of the improvements that can be made to the ZigBee standard routing protocols.

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Notes

  1. Note that we do not consider a ZigBee IP standard since ZigBee IP is a different protocol stack which runs on top of 6LoWPAN standard [30]. Performance study on routing protocols in 6LoWPAN can be found in [12, 27].

  2. Note that in non-beacon-enabled mode beacon transmission occurs only when the device (re)joins a network. Thus, no transmission happens for the other cases. On the contrary, in beacon-enabled network, devices that have joined a network periodically transmit beacons.

  3. Note that although transmission range are the same for all the nodes at the physical layer, there still exist asymetric links in terms of a network layer because of asymmetric traffic load on nodes. For instance, a node A can receive link status messages from a node B but the node B cannot because of collision or limited size of incoming/outgoing buffer.

  4. The 10 slots are enough to purely observe routing performance in our simulations regardless of the influence of packet drops due to send buffer overflow.

  5. ZigBee standard specifies resourceful nodes to store and answer queries about discovery information and binding tables of sleeping end devices

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2016R1D1A1B03933007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Group, R&D Division, YBrain, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Seong Hoon Kim

  2. Infoblox, 47400, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

    Poh Kit Chong

  3. School of Information and Communication Engineering, Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, 28644, Chungbuk, Republic of Korea

    Taehong Kim

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Correspondence to Taehong Kim.

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Kim, S.H., Chong, P.K. & Kim, T. Performance Study of Routing Protocols in ZigBee Wireless Mesh Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 95, 1829–1853 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-3996-7

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